


Aphrodite In The Mirror

by HarveyMcScorpius



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Inner Confliction, Interspecies Sex, Retelling, Sally Hawkins Nude, Teratophilia, belly bulge, dilemma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-21 17:00:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13745379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyMcScorpius/pseuds/HarveyMcScorpius
Summary: Though she’s had him stare at her in wonder a hundred times before, the molten oceans of his eyes are roiling now, burning into her. Something is different. An innocent, darker intellect dawns there.





	1. Stavrodrómi

**Author's Note:**

> A retelling of the first intimate scene between Elisa and the creature. I KNOW, it's been fanfic-ed to death. I still want to take a crack at it. It's arguably the most emotionally charged scene in the movie and really fascinates me.

The buzzing chaos that filled the air crackled away as Elisa slid the creature back into her tub. He had stopped trembling, no longer afraid she would reprimand him like an irritated schoolteacher for running away. Elisa had wiped the blood off of his chin and his chest when she'd bandaged Giles' wounds. Poor Pandora. She'd never been terribly attached to Giles' cats, seeing them more as background objects whereas their master was always her main focus, but even then she didn't wish for any of them to be devoured by a startled amphibian man.

Now, though she knew Giles had to carry a bloody pillow case out to the dumpster and say a tearful goodbye, all is well. The amphibian man sits upright, finned muscles rippling, stretching as the panic in his veins dies down. The paths of his eyes and Elisa's intersect, then blend, and he looks at her, content. In planes, the soft geometry of his face presents itself to her. His head has such an alien, exotic shape to it; layers of gills and scales and soft hidden membranes, like feathers. Elisa absorbs herself in the moment, and in him. Gazes melt together between them, heated by the glow of the wizened sun through the window. It's like she sees this time unfold through a kaleidoscope, or a haze. It's perfect, but muted. Soft. Slow, undemanding. It mozies and takes its time.

Elisa remembers watching the creature in a similar motion, trotting over to Giles like an ape. Pads on his fingers, like a frog's, connect with Giles' scalp and the old man's hand is pressed firmly to the amphibian man's finned cranium. Blue light dots up his body, popping into existence like stars under an inky, green sky. She'd stood in the hallway then, not wanting to ruin the bonding time between her two friends. The rest of the interaction was hidden from her, but the sound of Giles' shrill, reverent "Oh!" had made her giggle silently into her hand.

Before she can stop herself, Elisa reaches out and runs one slender finger over a spot she'd seen him illuminate; on his right pectoral, near his armpit. Under the slow caress, the light returns. The creature trills in a high key, like a marshy, wet flute. The glow under his scales is less stripe-like than she remembers. Instead of bands, undulating up and down his body, they are more isolated and still. They're dots in his flesh, lights piercing from his shell and out into the world. Or, instead of something coming _from_ those imagined holes and pouring out, perhaps they are a window _to_ , and look in. What does she see when she looks through them? Does she gaze upon his soul? Elisa shakes her head as she watches the little azure torches come to life and then burn out. Someone less enamored with life's poetry, someone like Zelda or Dr. Hoffstetler, would look at the light and see nothing but the work of nature. Camouflage for defense, or a disguise to aid in hunting.

And maybe they were right. But Elisa sees the spirit within him even when his lights are dim.

His eyes follow her face's small, imperceptible changes as she moves to the other side of him, trails of dotted light chasing her fingertips down his shoulder. The creature's head gently flares a little more. His full lips, as angelic as Apollo's, are slightly open; perhaps he forgets to close them, all his focus on the twirling fingertips touching him? Now Elisa is looking at him again. Though she's had him stare at her in wonder a hundred times before, the molten oceans of his eyes are roiling now, _burning_ into her. Something is different. An innocent, darker intellect dawns there. Elisa swallows, a little awkwardly, and tries to push it out of her mind.

As she studies his face, her hands rove into view seemingly of their own accord. Along the teal tiger-stripes under his eyes and forehead her fingernails run. In waves the tiny, ocean-colored fires rekindle below his skin. The light diffuses like silent lightning all the way down his gilled neck and chest, and he shivers visibly. The creature croaks again, deeper this time, more characteristically. The heated, freeing panic in Elisa's throat vanishes. Everything is fine. This is the creature she knows.

Until he reaches out to her, a fingertip of claw and pad massaging the cords in her neck.

Her eyes dart to his arm, extended her direction. Suddenly the sunlight through the window is not muted, or soft; it's crawling up Elisa's chest, flushing her cheeks and turning her thoughts to mush. Suddenly the moment is tense, in slow-motion, but leaving her no time to object (would she even want to?) or consider how she and the creature had found such a fate. Suddenly everything is too warm, too abrupt, too close, her clothes are too small and sweaty and her blouse is _so_ tight on her nipples and she has to get it off, _ocean waves crash and conflude into each other in her ears_ -

The creature gets one button of her collar open before she buries that pearl of yearning back in her heart and stands up. Closing the door and doing her best to ignore the perplexed chirps of the creature in the tub, Elisa sighs and gets ready for bed. Dubiousness slows her fingers as she sets her alarm clock, now wearing a teal nightdress. How will she ever sleep knowing that he will remain awake, flaming with guilt that he may have offended her? Elisa felt unfair faulting him for crossing such a line. The creature was wild, and obviously social norms she'd known all her life were odd to him, laughable even! Maybe wherever he was from, out in his humid Amazon jungle, his people were flagrant and flaunting with their desires, making love in the sun, in the open.

Even so, she hopes he's gotten the message. They were from different worlds, incompatible. They did not belong together.

Elisa had just slid her eyemask over her face when a thought occurs to her.

People said the same thing about white and colored people in love, and she certainly didn't have a problem with _that_.

They said the same of men and men or women and women getting together; of people who loved like Giles. Elisa wasn't bothered by that either.

Her mind wants to scream at her _look at him!_ _He's not even_ _ **human**_ _!_ But, the more she thinks on it, the more she associates her own denial with the arguments of racists and homophobes. Was the creature any more different from her than a black man would be? His body was different from hers, certainly alien . . . but the creature had the mind and soul and eyes of a man. _Eyes for her_.

A second idea breaches from the sea of self-doubt and second guessing in her head; a memory, something she'd signed to Giles what felt like years ago.

' _When he looks at me- the way he looks at me,'_ She'd told her friend, tears in her small but soulful eyes. ' _He doesn't know what I lack, or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am, as I am. He's happy to see me, every time. Every day.'_

And that still rang true. She knew what it meant.

Did the same bell chime in her heart?

When her eyes lock on the bathroom door, and she rises, walks to it and swings it open, finding herself so ferociously, terrifyingly in love, she knows the answer is yes.

**  
**


	2. Dóxa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedication to your readers is staying up till 1:17 AM:  
> -looking for synonyms for vaginas and penises and pubes  
> -looking over photo after photo of Doug Jones as the creature to figure out how exactly his penis is supposed to work with the way the scales fall, if Elisa describes it right  
> -researching how fish penises work in general  
> All in good fun. But seriously, I adore anybody who enjoys what I write.

He is buried in his thoughts, in his shame and his presumptuousness and the pulsing star in his heart, when the door knob spins and the door clicks open.

He panics, more terribly than when he'd incurred the wrath of _G-I-L-E-S_ just a few hours ago. That had been a familiar fear to him; so often the emotion came to him when his scales were covered in blood and a dead thing was near him. This new terror was different, more insidious. It made him fear for the future. The old was always momentary. It did not follow him. As he watched swamps of fluster and dread rise in the beautiful eyes of _E-L-I-S-A_ , he sees the unknown fright devour her opinion of him, in his mind's eye; it spits that pure jewel out. It is mangled, chewed, digested. She sees him differently now, like a thing.

Even if she views him as a conniver, lusty and forthright, he owes it to her to at least try and put that warped estimation of him back together.

She stands in front of the door, a skin of teal as smooth as the surface of a pond gracing her body down to her ankles. He nearly signs. The symbols come to him easier now, memory and repetition supporting them. Still they are slow, impeded. Tongues of men, from hand or mouth, confound him. But he'll do his best. _E-L-I-S-A_ must be told, in turn, of the new way _he_ thinks about _her_.

But she will not know tonight.

The hand-sounds are incinerated in his brain.

All of his focus is on her as she pulls her teal, smooth skin from her shoulders and it falls from her body.

That pulsing star in his heart is somewhere else in his body now, _significantly lower_.

 _E-L-I-S-A_ is ravishing. Her body is as curved and as pale as the moon, slender and smooth as a puma. Like that same predator, his golden eyes rove over her, devouring every contour and surface. Her legs, like silk to the eye and well-built from walking are no mystery to him. The skins she wears are incomplete, leaving them bare and exposed. Similarly, her carved neck and the angled, enticing oddity of her face are well known to him. Her hands, he knows most of all. They spoke to him, opened her heart to the world and broke him from bondage.

Now there are a bevy of new, undying sights for him to drink in. She bares so much of herself, so much blinding white skin, that the light touching her almost makes her glow; white fire to his blue.

She is all fullness and cream colors and magnanimousness. Her arms are different than he imagined. They are more developed, not at all the stringy things he'd envisioned. The portions of them nearest her shoulders, above her elbows, are proud and healthy. On her chest, two mounds of flesh reside. He remembers these; they denoted which of the humans could bear children, and which could not. They're decently sized, no bigger than fruits that grew on the mighty, aged trees of his home. At the spot where the curved swell of them meets her torso, shadows grow. He very much wants to run his claws along them. Caps of pink tip them, flushed and pointed. That same tinge, coupled with red, spreads into a thin blanket across her chest, across the molded, delightfully imperfect plane of her belly. Further down is what he knows she covets. The secret, unknowable spot that something inside him told him she knew well. It is protected by a curled coat of . . . _hair_ , she'd taught him. These are lighter, browner. Even from his place sitting, in the bath, he can smell it; something slick, sweet, flowering, coming from her. Below that, the first half of her legs press together. Rounded and wide, they shine ever so slightly, trails of fluid running down them.

The pure unceremoniousness of _E-L-I-S-A_ is like a mangrove crab in his mouth; rich heaven.

She walks to him. Stepping into her tiny, unmoving river that she instructed him to stay in, _E-L-I-S-A_ slides the curtain around them.

Now it is just him and her and the sunlight.

* * *

Elisa watches the creature for a long, long moment, flushed with red elation as she stands opposite him in the bathtub. Her chest heaves in slow rotations and she trembles like she's in ice water. She's nude as the day she was born in an apartment above a movie theater with an aqueous reptilian humanoid in her bathroom, with _ideas_ in her head. What now?

The creature makes the first move. Keeping his floodlight eyes on her face, he searches for any distress in her flesh as he makes to finish what he started. The blunt tip of a claw and a soft, green finger trail over her delicate throat. Images of what had transpired a few minutes before flash in Elisa's head, and vexation visits her again. Cool, sliding fingertips trail over her scars, and a deep trill resonates in her ribs. The discomfort is chased away and Elisa steps forward, closing the gap between them, leaning in to the creature's touch. Now his pectoral plates are at her eye level, and she has to crane her neck to look him in the eye. The primordial thing stirs again in them. Primal, but unabashed, coveting but sincere, it swims in the blacks of the creature's eyes and watches her, as he does.

It surfaces from those dark lakes when he fastens both wet palms on the curve of her hips and pulls her to him. The inch or two between their eyes burns, crackles. Lotioned skin and rosy nipples compress against chitin and weathered scales. He crooks his neck. The gills of the creature fold rather than be twisted by the motion and Elisa feels thunder rolling under her skin when his lips replace his fingers, clumsily meeting her scars on both sides; less of a kiss than a press. She taps him, and the lust in his eyes vanishes as he looks back at her. Attentiveness grips him, and Elisa taps her lips. Forming an O, as if to whistle, she signs _Like that_.

He tries again, at the ground-zero where her jawline and her neck meet; one of the fathomless sounds from him vibrates into Elisa's skin. Her eyes close, her breath hitching. The thunder that washes from that spot to her sex is joined by lightning now. The creature catches on, purring like a panther into her throat. The vibrations ripple and rock through her, and she gulps deeply. The sound is so baritone and dangerous, like he might devour her in more than just a sexual way. However imagined it might be, the risk of that thought just pours gasoline on the blaze in her belly.

From Elisa's hips to the small of her back the creature's hand goes, one finned forearm parallel to her spine. He holds her in a sort of scoop, like a dancer, jarring her eyes back open. Her own palms rest against the sides of his pelagic, beautiful face; studying the same ear-like fins and puzzle-piece head she had only a few minutes ago, before daring Destiny had changed everything.

Elisa gently guides his head down, angling their lips to lock together. Half-lidded, her eyes almost close again. She moves in for that final stamp on this newly-minted reality, built with an egg and a spoon and a coincidence.

She stops, eyes roving over his features again. The creature does the same, and warbles unknowable questions at her.

This is her last chance; her last chance to back out, to put her nightgown back on and apologize to the creature for losing her head. Elisa weighs her desires against each other. Is she certain this is what she wants?

Warm water laps at her calves.

The webbed, dribbling hands she'd tried to tell herself not to dream about for the past few weeks are on her, on her skin.

The amphibian man is eager, willing and ready and . . . in love.

Giles sleeps like the dead in the apartment next door.

Strickland has no idea where the creature was spirited away to.

Elisa doesn't have work for the weekend.

Every divot of his chest catches her nipples.

Her crotch is _throbbing_.

Her heart is _throbbing_.

His whole, expressive, rainbow visage fills her view.

What had she to regret, if she took this final step?

Elisa signals for the creature to form an O once again, and takes his lips in hers.

Though they looked so smooth and human, his lips were a minefield of different textures and sensations. In some areas they had what felt like miniscule sandpapers of scales, pink as a man's. In others, the color was the same; tiny patches of the skin, however, were smooth. It sparks a hazy curiosity in Elisa's mind as they kiss a third, fourth, fifth time. Perhaps the scales in a few spots had been filed down by years of biting down on unfortunate crustaceans? She'd seen the cleft of his teeth more than once; it looked specialized for cracking through shells of crabs or crawfish. Did they have those in South America?

That same ivory edge pricks her bottom lip, just enough to enrich her more, and the train of speculation violently vanishes. Elisa's back arches of its own accord, and one of the creature's hands moves up her body, cupping a breast gently. The water that coated him so often lathers her skin there, and a few drops run mercifully down her peaked nipples. The creature trails his claws from her collarbone down to the underside of her breast; he rumbles, throatily, in want and in something else, something more focused that Elisa's titillated mind couldn't quite place. Victory, maybe? Now the amphibian man squeezes, distributing pressure in inflaming intervals onto the fullness of her chest.

It is perfect. All of it is a comet of bliss in her body, and all of it prepares her for the main event. Elisa reaches down to her sex, feeling past the hair there to the equipment itself. She can feel her heartbeat in her clitoris. Her whole slit is evocative of him now; wet, undulating, intimately familiar to her. It was devout, ready, like she was; like she knows he is. But, as far as she knows, he's flat where a penis should be.

Or, _was_.

Slotted, hewn carapace between his legs had parted, horizontally, and retracted into his body. From within, a long, lissome, graceful cock emerges. Internal fluids glint on his shaft as it slides into place near parallel to his torso; oily, and serpentine. A duo of thin, triagonal, long fins grace the top and underside of him, maybe a centimeter high and running along all nine inches of him; they are the same lighter shade of green that his chest was, set against the pine-colored scales of his back and his arms. For all its length, it's slender, agile. Alive.

As Elisa tests herself, her hand brushed against this new discovery. The bottom fin caresses her knuckles and the creature purrs heatedly. She latches her fingers around him. The shape of the creature's cock, so alien and forbidden and tempting, turns the comet inside her into a supernova. He engorges in her grip as she turns him over, absorbing the dimensions of this hidden part he bares to her.

For an infinite, intimate moment, thought is banished, and there is only discovery as they pleasure each other.

Elisa feels him buck against her thigh, and the inferno at her core roasts her.

Forearms dappled in blue light hold her bottom, lifting her small body into the air; Elisa's athletic legs close like crab claws around his hips.

Her old life is gone forever as the creature pushes inside her.

The pace he sets is slow at first, trying to find her limits and stay within his own; through star-bursting eyes she sees his jaw lock, muffled beasts of noise caged in his mouth. The bouncing rhythm is uneven, inexperienced. _Is he a virgin_? Elisa could have beamed at the endearment that sparked in her, but the edge of the creature's cock's fins drags on her insides and she gasps. No matter how closely their groins chafe, there is always more of him he can feed into her. He's so deliciously long, and he's finding a beat to slip into.

One of her hands, braced against his shoulders while they joined, presses against her belly. Right above her navel, she leaves one finger. In tune with the ebb and flow of his cock into her, a bulge forms under her finger. Velvety tissues, often hidden when he was sheathed, meet the hair between her legs and he buries all of him within her. The bulge under Elisa's hand, under her skin, stays. He's _that_ deep in her, piercing into her body utterly. She clenches delicate, but mighty inner muscles down on the creature and he resumes his movements.

With every thrust he grows more fierce, more confident, more godlike. The creature slips into the beat of their lovemaking, disappearing into the flow of it like a downed ship might in a storm. He sets to work, fins and gills rippling and savages of sound prying his mouth open. His noises become louder and louder, deeper and higher, garbling with every piston of his cock into her. Elisa no longer sees him. Time and space are lost due to the soft spear stretching her open, working her. Her eyes shut and will open on a different world.

The vortex that blends their bodies turns to wrath now. The creature goes faster, harder, faster, harder; the drumbeat varies the longer it goes on, joined by a fast-rising crescendo of ragged breaths and saturated trills. Elisa feels that bulge in her stomach open and close more rapidly. More than anything the idea of the size of it, the way it splits her, is what drives her crazy. The creature was great, good and pervasive. He reaches places in her the sun does not touch.

 _Like her heart_.

The beat becomes a word.

_Glory, glory, glory -_

Elisa comes. Her insides lock the amphibian man's cock in a steel vice, as wave after wave of saltwater crashes over her ears and her slit and her soul. Her eyes rocket open, flashing fury.

Soon, the creature follows her. The monsters in his mouth are free, and he roars into her shoulder before his jackhammer teeth lock onto her flesh gently. Elisa feels him coat her insides; there he leaves something, a promise. Blue light overpowers the yellow for a moment.

Her legs ache as she unlocks them from their cage around his finned, shelled waist. Elisa stands, shakily, and his cock slides from her, drops of white decorating it.

The amphibian man's own release is over now, and he comes down from the high. His opal eyes, _eyes for her_ , see again, focused intently on Elisa's face; he watches once more for discomfort in her gaze.

Gold discharges through the window, filling the room. It wreaths them.

It is just him and her and the sunlight.

Elisa pulls the creature to her, tracing vows and covenants in the textures of his back.

He embraces her, desperately. Azure constellations dance along his teal markings.

Bells chime in their drenched spirits, and they are glory, glory, glory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed my work! See you next time!


End file.
